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"...the space defense initiative drove the USSR bankrupt, and it originated at my house in Tarzana."
- Larry Niven
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| Dolphin's Hands | ||
| Digital prosthetic for dolphins. |
Once you've found out that dolphins are intelligent enough to perform useful tasks for humanity, what can you pay them with?
| “Oh. Well, if I said it with a small h you’d think I meant humans, wouldn’t you? Potential paranoids, albino crashlanders, boosterspice allergics, people with missing limbs and resistance to transplants — handicapped like that.” “Yah.” “Whereas what I deal with is sentient beings who evolved with minds but with nothing that would serve as hands.” “O-oh. Like dolphins?” “Right. Are there dolphins on Down?” “Hell, yes. What else would run our fishing industry?” “You know those things you pay them off in? They look like a squirt-jet motorboat motor with two padded metal hands attached.” “The Dolphin’s Hands. Sure. We sell ’em other stuff, tools and sonic things to move fish around, but Dolphin’s Hands are what they mainly need.” “I make them...”
“Well, don’t you see that there must be Handicapped species all over the galaxy? Minds but no hands. I tell you, Jilson, it gives me the shivers. For as long as we expand to other stars we’re going to meet more and more handless, toolless, helpless civilizations. Sometimes we won’t even recognize them. What are we going to do about them?” |
| Technovelgy from Handicap,
by Larry Niven. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1967 Additional resources -
|
This is a precursor to the idea of Jones, the cyborg dolphin from William Gibson's 1981 short story Johnny Mnemonic.
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
